Matt Strassler.
Waves in an Impossible Sea: how everyday life emerges from the cosmic ocean.
Basic Books. 2024
In Waves in an Impossible Sea, physicist Matt Strassler
tells a startling tale of elementary particles, human experience, and empty space.
He begins with a simple mystery of motion—our
planet hurtles through the cosmos at 150 miles per second,
and yet we feel nothing of it.
How can our voyage be so tranquil?
The reason, Strassler reveals, is that empty space is a sea,
albeit a paradoxical one.
Much like water and air, it ripples in various ways,
and we ourselves, made from its ripples,
can move through space as effortlessly as waves crossing an ocean.
Deftly weaving together daily experience and fundamental
physics—the musical universe, the enigmatic quantum, cosmic fields,
and the Higgs boson—Strassler shows us
how all things emerge from what seems like nothing at all.
Accessible and profound, Waves in an Impossible Sea is the ultimate guide to our place in the universe.